Originally, emoticons were facial expressions represented by characters (e.g., ASCII characters) commonly found on computer keyboards, such as letters, numbers, and symbols. These original emoticons, once placed in an electronic message or an electronic posting by an author (e.g., electronic bulletin board), were meant to convey the author's mood or to convey/enhance the overall sentiment of the message or the posting. In beginning, these emoticons were limited to expressing moods, such as happiness, anger, sadness, and indifference. Gradually, however, the use of these character-based emoticons characters (hereafter, “character emoticons”) expanded to conveying meanings and messages.
Eventually, emoticons expanded further in type, availability, and usage. Today, emoticons include character emoticons and emoticons represented by graphical images (hereafter, “graphical emoticons”). With the availability of graphical emoticons, a user can depict a greater number of moods, meanings and messages not once possible with character emoticons alone. Both character and graphical emoticons are now available for use through a variety of digital devices (e.g., mobile telecommunication devices, and tablets), and are used in a variety of computing activities, especially with respect to the Internet. For example, graphical emoticons are commonly available for use when drafting personal e-mails, when posting messages on the Internet (e.g., on social networking site or a web forum), and when messaging between mobile devices. Generally, as a user performs a computing activity applicable to emoticons, the user may access emoticons through a menu or library from which they can browse and select emoticons for use in the computing activity.
Unfortunately, with the emergence of graphical emoticons, the number of emoticons a user can choose from has grown vastly. There are graphical emoticons available for almost every subject matter imaginable. Due to the expansion in number, usage, availability, and variety of emoticons, it can be quite time consuming, and sometimes overwhelming, for users to browse through and select appropriate emoticons for a given context when participating in emoticon-applicable computing activities.